Development of software applications generally comprises the steps of coding, building and deploying the application. Normally, a software developer is required to make modifications to various files comprising the application during the development process. In order to test the software application, the developer typically must build the application in the development environment of a development studio and deploy it on a test server. During the building process, the development studio may determine whether all application files are syntaxically valid and generate a single binary file from the application files that is deployable on the test server. Once the single binary file is deployed on the test server, the binary files may be extracted from the single deployed file and written on the test-server system under the server root. In typical software development studios, after making a set of modifications to one or more of the files comprising an application, the developer is required to build and deploy all application files on a test server regardless of whether or not a particular file was modified since the application was last deployed. This process can be time consuming, particularly when the application is complex and comprises a large number of files. As the development process often involves a significant amount of trial and error, it may be necessary to modify, build, and deploy a program many times before finalizing a satisfactory application. Because the building and deploying process may take several minutes, vast amounts of the developer's time may be wasted waiting for the application to build and deploy. Alternatively, developers may be tempted to avoid making necessary modifications as soon as the problem is identified, instead waiting until a later point at which either the problem becomes insurmountable or a number of problems have arisen that make the time required to rebuild and re-deploy the program appear more justified. However, delaying the resolution of problems until later stages of development can make the problems more difficult to solve. Worse yet, the problem may be forgotten entirely, and the application may be released with an unsolved bug.
Certain software development environments have attempted to avoid this inefficiency by allowing software developers to track modified files and manually synchronize them with the deployed application. For example, the developer may be allowed to synchronize modified files through a Windows XCOPY command or by a drag-and-drop operation to insert the modified files into the root of the deployed application. However, while such systems do avoid much of the inefficiency of rebuilding the entire application in response to each modification, they place a great burden on the developer to track each file that has been modified since the application was last deployed. If a developer fails to remember to manually synchronize a modified file, the developer may mistakenly believe that all problems have been corrected and release a defective version of the application.